One of the most persistent images in thermodynamics is that something is driving processes forward.
The language varies, but the picture remains remarkably stable: there is a direction, and something pushes along it.
This post begins by rejecting that picture.
Not provocatively, and not by denying thermodynamics, but by clarifying what thermodynamics actually describes.
Nothing, in this ontology, pushes anything forward.
1. The temptation to smuggle in a driver
When we observe a process — a gas spreading, a cup cooling, a crystal forming — it is natural to say that it happens because something makes it happen.
In everyday explanation, that something is often named:
heat flows
entropy increases
time passes
Each of these phrases quietly introduces an agent.
But none of these agents survive careful inspection.
Thermodynamics, as a discipline, does not actually posit a force called entropy, nor a mechanism called time-flow. Yet our explanations routinely behave as if it does.
This is the first conflation that must be undone.
2. Description mistaken for causation
The laws of thermodynamics are extraordinarily successful. But their success often tempts us to treat them as explanatory engines rather than what they strictly are: descriptions of regularities.
The second law, in particular, is frequently paraphrased as:
Systems tend to evolve toward higher entropy.
But the law itself does not say why a system changes, only that when changes occur, they overwhelmingly fall into a certain statistical pattern.
The difference matters.
That is a statement about availability, not propulsion.
3. No flow beneath the phenomenon
In the relational ontology developed across the earlier series, instantiation is not a temporal process. It is a perspectival cut: a way the world is construed as an event.
This has an immediate consequence for thermodynamics:
There is no hidden motion that entropy must explain.
What appears as a process unfolding through time is, from within the ontology, a pattern across successive construals — not a movie playing underneath reality.
Once this is accepted, the idea that something must be pushing the process becomes unnecessary.
Nothing is waiting to be driven.
4. From “why does it happen?” to “what is easy to keep doing?”
The crucial shift is subtle but decisive.
Instead of asking:
Why does this process occur?
we ask:
Given that construal continues, which continuations are structurally available?
Processes that look “natural” or “spontaneous” are simply those that sit in regions of high re-cut density.
They are easy to keep making.
5. Why reversals don’t happen (without forbidding them)
A common misunderstanding of the second law is that it forbids reversal.
It does not.
Nothing in thermodynamics prevents a shattered glass from reassembling, a gas from unmixing, or heat from flowing from cold to hot.
What thermodynamics describes is that such reconstruals are combinatorially inaccessible.
They require extraordinarily precise coordination across relations.
6. Clearing the ground
So this is the first clearing move of the series:
Entropy does not push.
Time does not drive.
Processes do not unfold because they are compelled.
What we observe instead are asymmetries of relational availability across successive construals.
In the next post, we will take the most entrenched metaphor of all — entropy as disorder — and remove it entirely, replacing it with a relational account that does real explanatory work.
For now, it is enough to have removed the invisible hand from the story.
Nothing pushes forward.
Things simply keep being easy to continue.
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